Big Brother (22 page)
“You’re honestly telling me that your lazy, two-faced brother has not eaten anything but those miserable protein shakes for a whole month. And you haven’t caught him hitting the Twinkies and said, ‘That’s okay, sweetie, I’ll overlook your stuffing your fat face as usual this one little time.’ ”
“That’s right. I told you: if he ever cheats, it’s over.”
I hung up, dolorous. It wasn’t only the lying. On the walk back from Java Joint, I’d allowed myself to seriously consider returning to Solomon Drive: I could make regular phone calls, stop by Prague Porches, meet my brother for walks. Besides, wasn’t Edison in the groove now? Yet when I found that box in the trash can, it came home to me that an arm’s-length involvement would never work. Perhaps that’s the revelation for which the box had been planted in the first place.
I
n reviewing Edison’s tailspin in New York—which I’d related in detail to Oliver, in the hopes that pouring my brother’s confidences into such a watertight vessel didn’t make me a snitch—I failed to derive a simple answer to the chicken-and-egg question of whether he got depressed because he was fat or vice versa. His weight had narrowed his professional opportunities, which was depressing, which made him eat, which made him fatter. It narrowed his romantic and sexual opportunities, which was depressing, which made him eat, which made him fatter. Fat itself was depressing, which made him fatter. I could grudgingly see how when you’re having such a hard time that you’re forced to sell the primary tool of your occupation, and then your younger squirt of a sibling who you’ve never really imagined would amount to anything—who to the contrary you’ve regarded as your own private cheerleader—is suddenly thriving on a national scale, well, okay, that’s hard to take.
Yet my-sister’s-famous-while-I’m-nobody was one small driver of a larger spiral into despondency. Edison had no real family of his own, and his career had hit the skids. He may have had friends, but in the last few years, by straining their goodwill, he’d lost more friends than he’d made. As I despaired to Oliver when we put our feet up in my office after hours, “The trouble is, he has nothing to look forward to.”
“With one exception,” said Oliver. “Which was all your idea. And if he ever does hit one-sixty-three, the only thing he still looks forward to evaporates.”
“I know,” I said, closing down my computer for the day. “When I first took this project on, I worried it was more than I could handle. But the real project turns out to be much, much bigger. I have to do nothing less than give my big brother a reason for living.”
“You can’t do that for anybody,” said Oliver readily.
“I can nudge him in the right direction.”
“What, get him excited about reviving his career? Talk up his résumé. Suggest he put out a solo CD. Goad him into boasting again—about all the headliners who’ve recognized his unparalleled talent.” The delivery was poker-faced. Though Oliver had kept his grave reservations about my Prague Porches folly to himself, I’d known him intimately for fourteen years, and his diplomacy was wasted.
“Right,” I said dryly. “Shore up the very vanity that triggered his if-I-can’t-be-famous-then-fuck-it obesity in the first place. Reconstruct from the ground up the same egomaniac nobody could stand, including you.”
“I never said I couldn’t stand him,” said Oliver innocently.
“Uh-huh. So getting him all jumped up over his career again isn’t the solution. After all, achievement hasn’t been the solution for me.” I nodded at my messy office. “I mean, sure, it was nice to be able to give Fletcher space to make his furniture. I’d never be able to run a private rehab clinic without some extra cash. And for a while, yeah, Monotonous was a kick. But these dolls are sure to become old hat sooner or later, and when suddenly nobody will be seen dead with one I’ll be relieved. For me, the big surprise has been that making a go of something professionally doesn’t turn out to matter that much. It’s not a reason for living.”
“So what’s the answer?
Love?
”
“In that case, he’s shit out of luck. I’m not much of a matchmaker.”
“But, Pandora, what does the guy
do
all day?”
I shrugged. “Little shopping. YouTube. Lots of TV. When I come home, we talk.”
“About what?”
“We do some soul searching,” I said cautiously, not wanting Oliver to feel supplanted. “But nobody can dig deep all the time, and we’ve started to run out of stories. It’s embarrassing, but the rest of the time we talk mostly about food.”
Oliver laughed. “Like how?”
“You know, reminiscing about our favorite childhood dishes—my mother’s ‘Spanish Noodles,’ with Kraft Parmesan and scads of greasy breadcrumbs. Which got soggier, Cocoa Puffs or Cocoa Krispies, and the color Fruit Loops turned the milk.”
“Sounds stimulating.”
“It is, believe it or not. The memories we trip are hallucinogenic. And you know I’ve been reading a lot, right? More than I have since college. I guess if I were more ambitious I’d be tackling
War and Peace
. Instead I’ve devoured Mark Bittman’s
How to Cook Everything
—all thousand fifty-six pages. So when Edison’s having trouble sleeping, I read him recipes. When I was small, he read me
The Little Red Hen
. Now I read him ‘Fried Chicken Made Easy.’ ”
“Listen, why doesn’t he get a plain old job? You’re big on hard work. Nothing worse for the existential heebie-jeebies than time on your hands.”
“Who’s going to hire Edison?”
“You,” said Oliver. “Put him to work here.”
“Ha! I can’t think of anything he’d want less.”
“He didn’t
want
to lose weight, and so far this bonkers diet has been the guy’s only salvation. Problem is, it’s temporary.”
“I’ll think about it. But I keep feeling the real answer is fiendishly subtle. Somehow he needs to learn to enjoy ordinary life.” That said, I’d always resisted this expression. Nothing was ordinary about the seemingly-small-but-secretly-ample delights to which it alluded.
“What, like—the perfect color toast?” Oliver suggested mischievously. “The first sip of a tart little Sauvignon Blanc at the end of a very long day.”
“Thanks. Yeah, I’ve scotched those thrills for now. But there has to be more to life than food and drink.”
T
here
was
more, and I devoted myself to locating it: the dry, squeaky crunch of virgin snow when I refused to allow inclement weather to deter our walkabouts. The discovery that, despite a temperature of fifteen degrees Fahrenheit, trooping about after a blizzard raised a light sweat, and by the time we got home we were hot. Breaking out the box set of
Joint Custody
that I’d asked Cody to fetch from my study and rolling on the carpet in hilarity. Calling Travis and announcing that Edison had now lost sixty-nine pounds and taking wan satisfaction in the transparent insincerity of our father’s encouragement.
Otherwise, I concluded Oliver was right: Edison could stand to appreciate the pleasures of unalloyed hard work, the kind at the end of which no one bursts into applause. Predictably, Edison resisted my becoming his taskmaster twice over. Yet once he gave Monotonous a reluctant try he was relieved to get out of the apartment, and the days went faster when he was busy. Assuming a woman’s humility, he learned to sew. I also used him for recordings, his big booming voice perfect for blowhards for whom families had cooked up just deserts. The other employees came to like Edison, admiring his unerring dietary celibacy—no more pizza boxes had cropped up in our trash can—as he held forth with the passion of the convert about the evils of Cinnabons. Stitching miniature denim jackets, he’d festively recount his most extravagant binges of ribs and racks of lamb, tales especially popular before lunch.
By throwing himself into the soft, gooshy embrace of a meatball hero, in the process losing everything from his professional standing to his Miles collector’s edition box set, and landing at last on the edge of a bathtub with his fly open while his own sister collected his turds like Easter eggs, my brother had emulated the alcoholic’s notorious prerequisite to recovery: he’d hit bottom. Yet I don’t think hitting bottom is therapeutic because you finally get to the point where things can’t get any worse. Things can always get worse. It’s more that you firebomb absolutely everything in sight that seems to keep you alive, only to wake the next morning perplexed, amazed, and maybe even furious that you’re still here. Tinker around its edges, and both the curse and blessing of your own existence simply sits there. For Edison, that discovery had to have been accompanied by an intuition that all along “making a name for himself” when he already had one had been merely a little extra, a maraschino cherry atop something momentous. Not fat,
momentous.
Nevertheless, one of the pleasures of “ordinary” life was music. Not appearing on posters or laying claim to big-name colleagues, but music, and for Edison that meant playing it. I’d a hunch he’d lost touch with the exhilaration of playing the piano for its own sake. So I rented one—an upright, whose very mediocre character I hoped would foster a casual attitude.
I’d arranged for Novacek to let the piano movers in that afternoon, so when we came home from Monotonous the instrument was sitting at a right angle to the scale. I was disappointed by Edison’s reaction. He didn’t look exultant. He looked worried.
“I don’t know, babe,” he said, surveying the piano from a safe distance. “I’m pretty rusty.”
“It’s a piece of junk. And I don’t want you to ‘practice.’ Think of it as music therapy. You must have
liked
playing the piano once. So I don’t want you to bone up your skills, and get all frustrated that your dexterity has deteriorated, or plot to make a smashing return to the stage in New York. I’ve always thought you were pretty good, but being good isn’t the point. I don’t honestly know, Edison, if you’ll ever be an internationally renowned jazz pianist again.” I tried to say this kindly. “I think it’s important for you to be able to live with the possibility that you won’t be. But no one can take music itself away from you, or the joy of playing it.”
He approached the keyboard with trepidation. He struck a chord with one hand, something minor and a little complicated, letting its anguish resonate for some time.
He didn’t want an audience, not even his sister. Edison Appaloosa not wanting an audience was a first, and not necessarily a bad thing. “We’re out of cranberry-orange tea,” I said. “I’ll run to Hy-Vee, and you two can get acquainted.”
To begin with, he’d only touch the piano when I was out, and I invented more errands to give him privacy. But after about ten days, I returned from another laconic, pulling-teeth coffee at Java Joint with Tanner, who would at least meet me on neutral territory. Edison was in the middle of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” “Please don’t stop,” I implored. And he didn’t.
Word to the wise: anyone on an all-liquid diet should play an instrument, and I regretted playing nothing myself. The piano was more involving than television, and Edison would hit the keyboard after work the way he used to hit the pantry. My brother’s musing, reflective riffs filled our apartment with life, compensating for the groceries that never slammed on the counter, the silverware that never clattered on the table, the baking pies that never spiced the air. His playing grew progressively lighter, trippier, more assured, but I almost didn’t want to say so, because I’d claimed up front that being good was not the goal.
Since I wasn’t encouraging him to sharpen his keyboard skills in order to plunge back into the Manhattan fray but only to keep us entertained, over time Edison relaxed his grip on the niche that had defined him, broadening gaily into ragtime, top-forty oldies like Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” standards like David Bowie’s “Starman,” and medleys of Queen, R.E.M., and Billy Joel. He took requests, and produced slant, improvised versions of the softie stuff I grew up on: Crosby, Stills, and Nash; James Taylor; Carole King. He played show tunes! Songs from
Chess
or
Sweeney Todd
. My growing affinity for jazz was genuine enough, but I can’t tell you the relief of getting a break.
Cody started coming by for lessons, though with her uncle’s newly catholic approach to music the education worked both ways, she introducing him to Lyle Lovett as he had introduced her to Thelonious Monk. The piano tutorials gave her visits a welcome structure; it had always been socially thin, only being able to serve her diet soda. Even so, evenings cleansed of mealtime distractions had a bare-bones starkness, but also an intensity that I now look back on with nostalgia. Eradicating the froufrou of hospitality stripped away the chitchat, too—about weather and new shoes. As hostages thrown together with a slop bucket must also have learned, it’s amazing how quickly you get down to emotional brass tacks with absolutely nothing to do but talk.
Cody became more forthcoming about her worries over choosing a career and the grisly host of eating disorders amid her classmates. She shared her humiliation at being forced to take a class in “Social Skills” because of being unacceptably withdrawn. “It’s retarded,” she said. “Six other rejects and a teacher who thinks she’s cool because she has butterfly tattoos on her ankles. We have to fill out a chart every morning on ‘How I Feel Today.’ Then Miss Hannigan—sorry;
Nancy—
stands in front of the class and yells, ‘I love you!’ while shaking her fist and scowling. So we’re meant to, like, have this revelation about how sometimes what people say and their ‘nonverbal cues’ don’t agree. Well, if you have to ‘learn’ that, you should be taken out and shot. Now everybody knows I’ve been stuck with these losers, and I’ll never live it down. What’s wrong with being ‘withdrawn’? Big deal, sometimes I don’t have anything to say, so I don’t say it. Unlike most people.”
In times past, that “most people” might have seemed a dig at her uncle, but Edison no longer inclined toward monologues about jazz. He shared more details about his failed marriage and a few other crash-and-burn romances. He finally confessed to a particular low point of his compulsive eating the year before: being forced to file off the metal bracelet I’d given him as a farewell present when he left for New York at seventeen, because the wire was biting his bulging wrist. When her uncle got maudlin over his estranged son, Cody pulled him up short: Just how hard had he really tried to arrange visitation rights? He admitted that to begin with he’d kept putting it off, anxious that Sigrid had poisoned the boy’s head with lies about his dad (worse, with the truth). Then in the last few years, by which time Carson was old enough to make up his own mind, Edison had been too ashamed of his size to arrange a rendezvous: “Maybe the cat’s always fantasized about finally getting to know his dad, going on hiking trips, or deep-sea fishing. How keen is the kid gonna be when he finds out the old man is close to four hundred pounds? I couldn’t deal with it, man. Opening the door to my only son and watching his face fall.”